not sure what to teach...

[lark265]

this is my first ESL teaching job (I have taught K-8 Special Ed. for 7 years) and I'm kind of "lost" in terms of what/how to teach...my class is made up of 18 immigrant women (from Mexico and South America) in their early 30's.....most are beginning to low intermediate level...I have tried the basic grammar approach (with worksheets, homework, etc) but this seems to be insufficient...a colleague has suggested teaching "topics" (ie, for one day, teach Greetings or Filling out Forms or Family, etc....becasue of the language barrier (I speak limited Spanish) it is difficult to gauge what iw working well and what isn't.....my students are getting incresingly bored and dissatisfied....I feel like I am not getting through to them...

[joshua2004]

Hi Lark,
Its going to be ok. You will do fine and your students are going to be happy that they had a teacher that actually cares about the issues you stated.

Here is my English language teaching philosophy in 25 words or less:
I teach using targeted listening and reading activities that are interesting.

If you can find lesson material that is in the "zone of approximal development", meaning they understand enough of the material to be able to follow it with some help, then they will learn. You will not see same day results but after a 2-3 weeks you will notice marked improvement.

Some examples of materials: news articles, music videos, movies, songs, short stories. It takes the exemplary student to be able to trudge through grammar lessons and boring, contrived reading passages.

[sueabroad]

Hi Lark
I will be in your shoes in a few months, so I empathise with you in advance! I hate to state the obvious, but have you done a "needs analysis " with your Ss? You can use a standard type of needs analysis or incorporate it into your teaching with a communicative task. That way you should be able to determine what they want to learn, how they want to learn, what they expect to achieve from your lessons etc. Unsure of what sort of constraints there are on you with regard to curriculum and employer expectations, but I would suggest basing lessons on a theme of interest to all or most of the women. eg everyday topics that assist the women to carry out daily tasks, socialize effectively, communicate effectively with shopkeepers, doctors, government officials etc. Make it very interactive, give them lots of opportunities to speak, and only include grammar as an "imbedded" part of the lesson where it is necessary to contribute to fluency and meaning. Not sure if this is helpful or not, but good luck anyway. There are heaps of ideas on the net. I'm only recently exploring them, and I'm constantly amazed at the ingenuity and generosity of contributors.
Sue

[Sally Olsen]

I am guessing that you are in North America so you could go to your local library and look at the books that are appropriate for the level of your students. There are adult sections for Literacy in most libraries or should be and they often have excellent resources. There should be something developed for your specific area with ways to deal with government forms and medical issues, etc as mentioned above. Finding the cheapest place to shop and the way the schools operate if they have children, etc. might be useful as well. If you have great resources, you can tape 5 minutes of the news in the morning and play that - the TV news has pictures which often help them understand and there are often students who can translate difficult parts for the others. You can get the script from the news station and use it for various "grammar" activities. he news will bring up many important topics to discuss. How about getting old computes from your organization or a volunteer organization and get them typing and learning word programs, etc while they do their assignments. You can usually get a lot of volunteers from the neighbourhood and get the poorer students some one on one help with those books from the library. Do you serve coffee and snacks and can they use a kitchen to make them? That opens up the possibilities of cooking, shopping, learning recipes and so on. I always found a volunteer activity that involved my students so they could begin to understand that volunteering was an important part of Canadian society. We served tea and cookies at the Citizenship Court, helped out the local school for skating parties and sports days and so on. We often held parties for the local senior's homes and that often brought us some more volunteers to help individual students. I always visited the local educational institutions that they could graduate to and encouraged them to find ways to fund their further education. I found that the Mexican students were often programmed to accept jobs in the service industries when they could aspire to other jobs as well but had never thought about it.

[FangWB]

this is my first ESL teaching job (I have taught K-8 Special Ed. for 7 years) and I'm kind of "lost" in terms of what/how to teach...my class is made up of 18 immigrant women (from Mexico and South America) in their early 30's.....most are beginning to low intermediate level...I have tried the basic grammar approach (with worksheets, homework, etc) but this seems to be insufficient...a colleague has suggested teaching "topics" (ie, for one day, teach Greetings or Filling out Forms or Family, etc....becasue of the language barrier (I speak limited Spanish) it is difficult to gauge what iw working well and what isn't.....my students are getting incresingly bored and dissatisfied....I feel like I am not getting through to them...

Hi, Lark.

I have taught both English and Chinese as second languages to students at all ages and all levels. I totally understand how you feel. From my 14 years experience of teaching, I would say that Total Physical Response (TPR) and Realia are one of the best strategies for beginners. TPR means you need to use a lot of gestures and physical movements while teaching vocabularies and giving directions. For instance, I did aerobics with my class while teaching positions (up, down, left, right, and etc). Realia refers to using real objects as teaching materials. For the unit of foods, I asked my students to bring real food to class for discussions and games. At the end of the unit, we opened up a pretend restaurant and invited their families over to our grand openning. Each of them needed to create a receipe (in the language that they are learning) and make a dish to bring to the grand opening. Then they act like servers to practice more. This unit integrates all four language components (speaking, listening, reading , and writing).
Hope this helps and wish you the best.

Fang